Category: Take5

Research-based insights are becoming the lifeblood of business, as the ability to conduct research and obtain the needed intelligence from key stakeholder audiences becomes more and more accessible. What sometimes happens though, is that an organization thinks every challenge they face requires another round of research to help overcome it. That is not always the case. Often, when developing a fact-based brand strategy for a client, we find that the client already has a rich body of research work on hand, often done for other purposes such as customer satisfaction or new product development, which can be effectively ‘re-purposed’ to meet their branding challenges.

In those situations, there are key questions and considerations to think about to determine if there is value in re-purposing existing research:

1. How aged is the research?

Typically, leveraging a client’s existing body of primary research works if it is either A) done within the past year or, B) part of an ongoing research program where insights are consistently refreshed and updated.

2. What stakeholders were included in the prior research?

If the research in hand isn’t touching the right audiences for understanding how the company’s brand has had an impact or what branding elements will resonate going forward, it will be of little utility to the brand strategy being developed. An example of this is: If the stakeholder audience is too limited, or not representative of the audience needed to understand from a brand perspective.

3. What research measures have been captured?

Specific types of research programs, such as customer satisfaction or loyalty research, tend to be consistent in the types of measures they capture; i.e. rating a company or provider on a host of touch points including service quality dimensions and product performance characteristics, in order to better understand which ones influence customer behaviors. These same dimensions can also be analyzed in a different way, to help identify the drivers of brand perceptions and attitudes, and where a brand stands relative to certain stakeholder segments and relative to the competitive set. Outputs such as perceptual maps to see where desirable and attainable brand image exists, or key driver analyses to determine what factors most impact brand perceptions, are but two examples of how this type of customer satisfaction and loyalty research can be re-purposed.

4. How has the research been received, or used internally?

If the research being done is not contributing to the business strategy in a material way, it calls into question the rationale for doing it and possibly the quality of the insights, so then it may make sense to suggest a new, custom research initiative for the branding process. On the other hand, if the research is seen as important tool for managing customer expectations, developing products, or responding to the competition, than it probably has the power and quality needed to support teasing out some additional insights for the brand strategy.

5. Make sure to still include an internal research component expressly dedicated to the brand challenge.

This is key not only to understand internal perceptions of the brand, but to also better frame the existing research data from a brand perspective. With the internal perspective on the branding challenges they face, it is easier to look at the results of existing research done for other purposes through the branding lens, and repurpose it appropriately.

Think through these questions and considerations to help maximize the existing research that can be leveraged for the branding challenges ahead.

You’re in the midst of a look and feel exploration, reviewing color palettes, imagery style, and secondary graphics – design elements that evoke an immediate reaction. But when you get to the typography evaluation, you’re not quite sure how to determine which typeface (or font) best represents your brand and marketing needs.

It’s an important decision, because it’s how what you say is said. Here are some tips on evaluating and selecting typefaces for your brand:

1. Express the brand’s personality

What you say is just as important as how you look, and typography does both simultaneously. It needs to communicate the essence of the organization through carefully drawn letterforms. We like to say that typefaces, like people, have their own personality. Brands have personalities, too. When developing the brand platform, we define attributes to help guide the look and feel of the brand.

Think about what Apple communicates: Simple, easy, approachable. Their typeface – Myriad – embodies all of those qualities, down to the round dot on the ‘i’. And how they use it is just as effective: Black type on a white background.

2. Serif or sans serif?

Find the right combination of serif and sans serif to tell the brand story. There are thousands of typefaces to choose from, but it boils down to two main font categories: serif and sans serif. Classic serif typefaces – like Garamond – project a more established, traditional, and trusted feel. Sans-serif typefaces – like Verdana – communicate a more simple, friendly, and modern look.

Traditionally, serif typefaces are easier to read in large bodies of text, which is why most publications – both print and online – use them. On the other hand, sans-serif typefaces are great for technical copy, small block blocks of text, and even headlines and subheads. Both are interchangeable, but it comes down to balancing the appropriate personality and, of course, legibility.

3. Deliver the message

Your typography is the vehicle for communicating messages. The typeface enhances the message, it shouldn’t distract from it. Is your romantic, blue-sky headline more effective in Helvetica Bold ALL CAPITALS or in Times New Roman Italic? Is your call to action stronger in Georgia or Frutiger?

Consider how the small details, like upper and lower case letters, play into messaging. Using ‘Title Case’ for Headlines Will Convey a More Serious Tone, while ‘sentence case’ is more approachable and casual. And be on lookout for those whacky ampersands, ‘Qs’, question marks, and other characters. The last thing you want is to license a typeface only to realize that one or more symbols distracts from your message.

4. Rein in the number of weights and styles

Just because a typeface may provide the flexibility of a dozen weights and styles, doesn’t mean each one should be used. Most typefaces have multiple weights and styles, including Light, Regular, Italic, Bold, Bold Italic and Black. Some typefaces even have Condensed or Extended styles. While that level of flexibility is useful for some communications, it’s best to limit the number of styles you actually use.

You can shift the size or the weight to change the message hierarchy, but it’s not necessary to do much more than that. If Palatino Regular is used for titles on print collateral and for headlines in advertising, communications would be more consistent and recognizable than if Palatino Bold were used on one piece, Italic on another and Bold Italic on another.

5. Don’t be limited to what’s on the PC

Don’t stifle your brand’s personality with what’s available in PowerPoint. Software applications may limit what fonts you can use on a daily basis, the typefaces representing your brand shouldn’t be limited to Times New Roman and Arial. Designers often recommend typefaces that aren’t widely available for a reason.

Print materials from ads to fact sheets and annual reports should always leverage those carefully selected typefaces. Even online, more and more typefaces are available as Webfonts so what you communicate is seamless from traditional print materials to websites and mobile devices.

Typography is the one tool you use most often in your daily communications (how else would you be reading this?). Invest the time and strategy to ensure your fonts are appropriate for your brand and corresponding communications, lest your efforts become viewed as the equivalent of .

Most organizations — from corporations to religions, start-ups to centuries-old industrials — have mission and vision statements. Through the evolution of contemporary management and brand consulting practices, these two important statements have often become confused with other critical business strategy tools used to guide an organization.

Creating a vision and mission statement requires the full understanding and participation of an organization’s leadership. It takes creativity and honesty, passion and analytics, a look in the mirror today and a telescopic gaze into the future. Here are five important steps to developing an effective mission and vision statement for your company.

1. Know the difference between a vision statement and a mission statement.

A mission statement speaks to the cold, hard facts. It describes what the organization does, its reason for being, and its general purpose. Both internal and external, the mission statement communicates business direction to employees, customers, partners and stakeholders. On the other hand, a vision statement focuses on the enterprise as it might look like in the future, say 10 years from the present. It should be emotional, inspirational and aspirational. Both are needed to stay grounded in your day-to-day goals while striving towards future endeavors.

2. Identify who your company’s missionaries and visionaries are.

A corporate missionary embodies your organization’s ideals and goals, effectively acting as a figurehead. A visionary is someone with the imagination and insight to look into the future clear-headed, and craft an accurate and articulate vision to drive the present into the future. Visionaries can be found across many categories, don’t just focus on senior leadership. Think Steve Jobs, Nelson Mandela, Basketball coach Pat Summit, physicist Stephen Hawking, Baseball’s Branch Rickey, rock star Steven Tyler of Aerosmith. Who are the visionaries in your company?

3. See today and the future from different perspectives.

There are many points of view for most organizations. There are employees and leaders, customers and clients, vendors, partners, stockholders and competitors. Both of your statements must take into account multiple perspectives. Your mission statement must ring true to employees today, and your vision statement must be emotional enough to inspire them towards the future. At the same time, you must balance and integrate all the other perspectives to create the best statement for the organization.

4. Choose the right language to communicate your statements.

These statements are not business strategies. They are meant to communicate clearly and simply — and to inspire. When writing a mission statement, avoid clichés and “corporate-ese.” Strong, powerful, and definitive phrases with active verbs ground your organization in the now. For vision statements, go for inspiring and emotional language to motivate employees in the future. Be professional and be profound.

5. Share your mission and vision statements thoughtfully.

Just publishing your final statements in an annual report or through employee communications isn’t enough. They become only words on paper. To bring them to life, organizations must share them through workshops, encouraging employees to interpret the vision statement and demonstrate how they will live it on the job. Share your mission statement in creative communications so your external audiences can see it and know you better.

Creating your mission and vision statements takes hard work and dedication across your entire leadership. When done right, you’ll have a guiding light for today and into the future.

Another year has come and gone. Many of you have worked diligently to ensure that all branding efforts helped your brand increase its value, connect with all stakeholders and retain its competitive edge. As we look back, we can applaud our efforts, bask in our successes and learn from our challenges. We can also ask ourselves if there were anything we would have done better or even differently? With a new year right around the corner, we have an entirely new set of 365 days of opportunity where we can continue to make brand performance improvements.

Here are five questions you can ask yourself and your answers will help to determine the areas requiring the most brand focus over the next 12 months:

1. Did your brand achieve its highest value?

Every brand has equity. It can be something tangible such as its actual financial worth and brand equity value, which we define as the impact of brand on financial performance expressed as the percentage of market capitalization directly attributable to brand.

Do you know how much of your brand actually contributes to corporate value and/or stock price? Brand equity can also mean something more emotional such as having a strong association to specific core values that are rooted in a trusted brand heritage (i.e. Johnson’s baby) or in customer service (i.e. Amazon, JetBlue). Perhaps your brand is strongly associated with certain visual attributes such as color, typography and imagery (i.e. Coca-Cola, Harley Davidson). Do these still apply to your brand? Are there specific strategies you should be employing to increase your brand’s financial and emotional equity?

2. Is your brand’s strategic platform still providing a unique point of difference?

While you know who your competition is, when was the last time you conducted a thorough strategic analysis of not only your brand’s positioning, but also those of its peers? Competition is increasing across all industries and product categories, with mergers and acquisitions resulting in powerhouse brands and with the influx of new brands launched each year. Where your brand may have once dominated a certain white space, you may find that you are no longer alone and that the competition is infringing upon your territory and causing confusion among your target audience. While your core promise might still apply, perhaps there is some aspect about your brand’s personality and/or positioning that need to be updated.

A simple “gut check” on your brand platform may indicate the need to make adjustments. Some times minor enhancements can result in significant increases in brand performance, especially in further differentiating from the competition.

3. Were your employees, customers and investors fully engaged with your brand?

Once you’ve ensured your strategy is on target, your brand must be fully engaged with your audiences. It all starts with your employees. Your employees are your brand! The best of the best brand strategies will not reach true potential until your employees embrace the strategy and live the brand to the fullest. From the mailroom to the c-suite, from the new hire to the most-tenured employee, each person must be engaged in the brand. This causes a positive reaction that enables them to successfully influence and engage customers, making them want to buy. It also will make investors take notice, enticing them to support and invest in your brand.

4. Is your brand still dressed for success?

Your brand’s overall look and feel greatly influences its ability to connect with your customers. Is your corporate or brand identity as strong as it can be? Chances are, when it was initially designed it was developed for traditional media and communications outlets. Have you assessed your brand’s identity and visual platform within the digital space including the web, mobile and social media? Is it responsive in the digital world? Is your brand’s look and feel evolving with the times and keeping itself relevant with your customers? How does your brand look compared to competitors? Does your brand still “own” a particular color, typestyle or icon or does it need to be evolved or even get a facelift? Visual appeal is critical in ensuring your brand stands out from the crowd and avoids getting lost in a sea of sameness.

5. Has your brand been speaking with a consistent voice?

Your brand is at the center of the universe. Its strategic platform is the blueprint that defines your brand and how you do business, your internal culture and your overall communications’ strategy. When doing strategic outreach, your brand’s core messaging must be consistent, yet tailored to each of its target audiences for maximum impact. For example, how you speak to an investor would be different than how you speak to your employees and even a vendor. However, in order to build your reputation effectively, you must have a consistent voice, keeping true to your brand’s essence. While the intended audience may influence individual messages, the core of your brand should ring true throughout everything you communicate.

It takes time and thoughtful planning to build a great brand. The BMW-owned MINI is an example of careful brand planning long before the car was first sold in the US, making the marque appear to spring to life, fully formed and cool. Other brands take years to come into their own. Starbucks opened its first store in Seattle in 1971. As of October this year, there are thousands of Starbucks locations in 62 countries — all remaining true to the brand’s look, feel, taste, and gathering place. But it wasn’t until the 1990s that the Starbucks brand came into its own.

Regardless of how they start, all great brands are built on a well-conceived brand platform. To build yours, start with these five steps:

1. Start on a solid foundation of understanding.

What’s true about your organization should form the rock-solid basis of your brand. Take a good look in the mirror and determine just who you are. How do you conduct business? Do you try harder like Avis? Are you great in service or production? Are your tools as tough as Sears Craftsman? Is the company a time-defined leader or an upstart start-up?

2. Support your brand with your strengths.

Every company has its own immutable and distinctive strengths. It could be your people or your products, your knowledge, or your expertise. Chubb Insurance is strong on experience and service. Trader Joe’s stores pride themselves on discovering interesting foods. Whatever your strengths, they form the pillars to support all your branding efforts.

3. Examine your personality.

Your employees each have their own personality. But a company itself needs its own unique personality. Identify the three or four attributes that characterize your organization and describe them in human-like adjectives. Ace Hardware stores chose “helpful.” United Airlines has reclaimed “friendly.” These will guide everything you say and do with your brand.

4. Stake a position.

With a world of many competitors, you need to help your customers understand where you stand relative to the other brands. What makes you different? Why should someone do business with you? Consumers only have so much room in their brains in some categories. In the 1970s, the classic 7-Up lemon-lime soda brand positioned itself as the Uncola to take on Coke and Pepsi.

5. Keep your promise.

All of your work should rise up to one big idea. It’s what your product or service promises to deliver to your customers and employees that touches their hearts and souls. Tide laundry detergent promises to get sheets “whiter than white,” which isn’t about color but the satisfaction and purity that comes with cleanliness. The web site Pinterest is a tool for collecting and organizing things, but the root of it is really about sharing. Once you’ve made your brand promise, you must hold true to that promise in all your communications and consumer interactions.

Laundry detergent? Female. Pick-up trucks? Male. Feminine hygiene products. Definitely female. Beard softener? Macho. But what about breakfast cereal? Cars? Gardening products? And condoms? As the boundaries of what’s masculine and feminine blur through the gender and orientation of actual customers, traditional gender-based marketing is following suit.

TV advertising now features dads selecting detergent, single women shopping for cars, and heterosexual couples buying condoms together. But to add to the changing gender-based roles of traditional audiences, there’s a growing recognition and acknowledgement of same-sex couples, gay and lesbian, and transgendered audiences that makes gender-targeted branding increasingly complicated. It’s time that brands raised their awareness of gender, too.

Communicating gender-specific brands takes sensitivity and savvy. Here are five key factors to help align your efforts:

1. Know your brand’s past and present audiences.

Some brands retain their gender focus after decades in the market; others change their gender relevancy as society and audiences evolve. Take breakfast cereals — once targeted solely to women, this category has since expanded audiences as men took a more active role in feeding their families. Use research to review your current audience demographic to ensure you’re not missing out on expanding to other audiences.

2. Don’t get caught up in stereotypes.

Brands themselves have no gender. A car is a car. Paper towels are used by both men and women. It’s the associations that people bring to products and services that can attach a gender bias. Be sure that your messages and perspectives speak to the product’s benefits; not your pre-conceptions about who uses it.

3. Put purpose behind your messaging.

You can’t be everything to everyone. You can’t even be most things to one gender. Have a clear brand platform and justify your brand identity through reasoned and thought-out messages. Gender-based brands with a well-founded identity can better weather consumer cynicism towards masculine/feminine brands.

4. Stick to who you are and what you stand for.

You can no longer assume traditional roles and send clichéd messages to your audiences. Consumers are savvier than ever and will call out insincerity or poorly communicated efforts. If your brand is honest about what it stands for, don’t be afraid to show it.

5. It’s okay to be gender-neutral.

You can target all genders equally or work to find a balance. Many companies are realizing that gender-based brands will not remain 100% gender specific. Women will purchase condoms for their men; men will make better choices in toilet paper. Remember that cash registers are gender-neutral.

The ultimate goal of your brand is to help sell your products and services. The trick is to find and build brand relevancy among your target demographics to better sustain and grow market share. Being true to your brand also means being true to who your customers are.

It’s no secret anymore that an essential element of an internal brand launch or refresh starts with a powerful employee brand engagement program. But to make the introduction of your new brand more than an announcement at an all-staff Town Hall meeting, or a coffee mug with a new logo, you’ll need to inform, teach and engage with your employees so they can understand, and learn how to act “on-brand.”

Every organization is different, but here are five proven secrets to keep in mind when developing your employee brand engagement.

1. Think like an insider.

Understand what your employees need to know, who influences them and how they learn. Brand may seem like a soft communication to many people. Showing that your brand strategy can help realize the goals of your business strategy can make converts across your organization.

2. Put the right team in charge.

A multi-disciplinary team representing branding, HR, training, Learning & Development and internal communication will give you a broader perspective with more insight and guidance on how to reach and engage effectively with employees. By enfranchising these sometimes disparate departments, you will be able to reach employees during all phases of their worklife – from on-boarding to performance reviews to daily work.

3. Make a commitment.

An employee brand engagement program that’s all fireworks and no substance will soon fizzle out after introduction. Considering that a new brand takes time to be accepted among employees (as it will with your customers and prospects), you will need top-level buy-in and resources from senior leaders to maintain your program for months. You’ll lose credibility if you start and stop half way through a program.

4. Ride the curve.

Support for an employee brand engagement program aligns with a traditional Bell curve. The front of the curve is typically made up of allies who will immediately embrace a new brand when they understand its rationale and importance. The front of the rising curve are fast followers who, once they are engaged, will follow the leaders. Employees on the tentative back of the curve often need more encouragement and explanation to coax them over the hump. Lastly, the highly vocal naysayers often get too much attention. Acknowledge them, but spend your time and resources elsewhere.

5. Engage your whole company.

Your people are your brand. That means everyone – from the executive floor to the factory floor. To get the buy-in from the entire company, you have to make the strategy and implementation of your new brand relevant to each person. For the sales team, a new brand is an opportunity to be different from the competition. To the C-Suite, your brand can have an impact on market price. To an engineer in product development, your brand is the inspiration for a new idea. But as the driver of the brand engagement, it’s up to you to connect your people with their brand.

Imagery is a vital part of any visual identity system. Building a central repository of “brand-correct” photography can be a terrific way to ensure that your images are working as hard as your other brand assets in communicating a consistent and appropriate tone across all touch points. But what’s the best way to build that library?

While there’s no one-size-fits-all approach, these five will get you started in the right direction.

1. Use strategy as your guide

Just like every other aspect of your visual identity, imagery needs to reflect your distinctive personality traits and positioning in the market. Many organizations do a terrific job of building a brand platform and developing a brand positioning. They also tailor logos, color palettes, type systems and graphics to their brand strategy, but go “off the shelf” when it comes to their images. Your agency should help you define what a “branded” image looks like, both in terms of overall style as well as content. That will be the guide as you populate your library, providing you with a powerful tool that’s in alignment with all of your other brand assets.

2. The more proprietary, the better

I almost hate to say it, but the best image libraries I’ve come in contact with have been populated with commissioned, proprietary photography. By “best”, I mean most distinctive and relevant to the brand. I’m sure that seems obvious, but it’s worth a reminder. Yes, the idea of building a proprietary library from scratch can seem daunting in terms of time, logistics, and cost. But, depending on your particular criteria, it can be eminently achievable and not even as expensive as you might think. Even if it’s only for a portion of the library, you owe it to yourself and the brand to research it as an option.

3. Be creative

It’s safe to assume that you rarely have the luxury of an open-ended timeline or copious amounts of money when developing brand assets and tools. This is also likely true in other areas of your business. But, in other situations, you might be more willing to think outside the box and be extremely creative with the resources and talent to get the job done ahead of schedule and under budget. Why not with an image library as well?

Sourcing brand-appropriate photography doesn’t always mean superstar photographers, exorbitant locations or model fees. We recently supplemented the image library of a non-profit by engaging several of our photographer friends to shoot people and scenes from their day-to-day lives at their leisure over the course of a couple of weeks (all with appropriate consent and model releases). While we compensated the photographers well for their time, other expenses associated with photo shoots were avoided and the result was a set of genuine and distinctive images that fit the brand to a T.

4. Make it your own

As much as I believe in point number 2 above, the fact is: Most libraries are populated with stock images. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. The selection of high-quality stock photography out there is tremendous. But, with a little extra effort, you can make your stock-filled library feel almost as proprietary as a custom effort.

By doing some consistent post-production adjustments to visual elements such as color balance or saturation (using your identity and color system as a guide), or pre-cropping images in a unique way, you can not only make photos from different sources feel more like a unified family, but also add to their distinctiveness and alignment to your brand.

5. Don’t forget context

As you’re building your library, always keep your ultimate applications in mind. If your organization does a fair amount of web banners, for example, be sure your library contains images that can be cropped/extended for long horizontal use. Engage the owners of key customer touch points in your organization to make sure their communications needs are well-understood; not so much about style as it pertains to the brand, but specific content and format needs. A well-thought out image library is only effective if it gets put to use.

Making sense of data can be overwhelming – and the challenges only become increasingly compounded in this age of “Big Data” as more sources, bigger data sets, and less-structured content continues to be made available. But developing meaningful findings out of data is a highly thoughtful human exercise that no algorithm can ever replace.

We refer to this process as “strategy-driven insight” – an approach to collecting and analyzing data designed to achieve the stated objectives of an organization.

Here are five tips to help you focus on what is most important when it comes to packaging information in a way that is truly actionable:

1. Wear three hats at once.

Developing a meaningful narrative from data is not only about doing good research – it must also be purposeful to a company and capable of influencing the behaviors of the people that shape those organizations. This process requires that you consider the following three perspectives: -Scientific: be methodical, rigorous and logical -Business: focus attention on growth, profitability and efficiency -Human experience: integrate the personal, the emotional and the entertaining.

2. Know where you’re going, but be open to surprises.

Before you begin generating insights, create a clear direction for the path you intend to follow based on the goals of the organization. But be prepared for the unexpected. If something doesn’t fit, take a step back, reevaluate and adjust your commentary accordingly.

3. Utilize whole-brain thinking.

Convergent thinking is the process of developing clear, concise answers to a problem – this is often associated with linear and analytic “left brain” thinking. Divergent thinking is a method used to generate creative ideas by exploring many possible solutions – this is often associated with intuitive and creative “right brain” thinking. Strategy-driven insights require both, so be comfortable drawing from the two hemispheres of your gray matter by embracing the chaos and contradictions experienced between exploring options and narrowing choices.

4. Follow the large and the small.

In the world of statistics, normal curves, major trends and general patterns are effective ways to map out data. But in the world of insights, it is equally important to pay close attention to the details and the outliers. Utilize both quantitative and qualitative findings – and have each inform and challenge the other.

5. Use the tenets of branding as your guide.

As the process of analyzing and translating data takes you into new territory and shines light on things you may have never seen or considered, it can quickly become confusing. To easily prioritize and organize the final story, come back to the basic questions we use when evaluating brands: is it clear, relevant, believable, and differentiating?

If you are mindful of these methods, you will be successful in transforming reams of 1s and 0s into plans that move people and businesses.

You’ve invested time and resources into creating a clear and compelling brand. Now what? Even the best strategy will go to waste if your brand isn’t properly implemented and maintained. Consistency across all touch points reinforces and turns up the volume on your brand promise. Alignment in everything you say and do is essential in building awareness and nurturing positive impressions of your company. While the underlying strategy will shape your visual and verbal expression, it is your brand guidelines that ensure the integrity of your brand image. They are a critical tool in brand management. Yet many companies file them away in a drawer and never look at them again, jeopardizing their brand investment.

Here are five tips for getting the most out of your brand guidelines

1. Paint the full picture.

Your guidelines should begin with the full brand story to put the brand expression in context. Even if it only includes a brief overview of the strategy, it will help everyone working with the brand to develop a deeper familiarity. Knowing why the expression was built the way it was fosters understanding that will enable them to better promote the company.

2. Don’t forget the exceptions.

Every brand guidelines will come with a set of dos and don’t: how to use – and how not to use – all of the elements of the visual and verbal expression. The larger a company is the more likely there will be exceptions to some rules. Outlining the known exceptions to the rules will reinforce that there are a limited number of ways a brand can be altered.

3. Share with everyone.

Don’t limit the distribution to just the marketing or communications staff, everyone in the company and even some vendors/partners should be aware of the brand and its multiple verbal and visual components. Create the document as a PDF or online tool so it is easier to share. Not only does this save printing costs, but it also makes it easy for people to store on a computer desktop for quick reference when creating a document or determining the tone of an email or a proposal to a prospect.

4. Avoid insider jargon.

Guidelines should be written for designers and non-designers alike. Many professionals outside the creative realm aren’t as up to speed on design terminology or software applications used to create materials. But everyone should have a basic understanding of how all the components work together. Use references and language that can be universally understood by everyone who uses the guidelines.

5. Appoint the brand police.

All guidelines should include a contact person (or people) who is a resource and gatekeeper for all branded materials. This person can coordinate training and tutorials and answer quick questions. They should be given the authority make decisions when the guidelines may not cover a specific usage or scenario. They should also be empowered to identify off-brand items and remove them from circulation.